Immigration Blog

Even before the president followed through on executive actions effectively granting amnesty to millions of aliens, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of what the administration had already done, vis-à-vis dismantling immigration law enforcement. Of course that lawsuit never materialized — no surprise to those who question Boehner's real commitment to the rule of law, at least where immigration processes are concerned. Read more...

Yesterday I expressed dismay at the New York Times story that used the Southern Poverty Law Center's Heidi Beirich to cast a moral shadow on Roy Beck, the head of NunmbersUSA. Now, writing as a former reporter, I need to flesh out the journalistic indictment.

Heidi Beirich is not a credible source on Roy Beck. To understand why, just do a word search here for "Beck" or "Beirich". Much of what she has said about those who want to limit immigration is intellectually bankrupt, morally negligent, and ethically reckless. When it is invoked by an important newspaper like the New York Times, it has a chilling effect on a national discussion that should be civil, well informed, and intellectually vibrant. That discussion should not be strangled by the SPLC's McCarthyite tactics of smear and character assassination. Read more...

It is sadly ironic that New York Times reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis thought she could illuminate the character of NumbersUSA head Roy Beck by consulting Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose serial efforts to assassinate the character of those who want to limit immigration show the ethics and subtlety of a $100 hit man.

The result was not fit to print, particularly this paragraph, which is fit to be stuffed, mounted, and hung in the newspaper Hall of Shame. Read more...

Keeping the homeland safe. That's what it's supposed to be all about, in this near-apocalyptic post-9/11 world, isn't it? Isn't that the reason we've spent billions upon billions reengineering the organs of government, created a massive new homeland security department, infringed on the liberties of ordinary Americans in ways unimagined and unimaginable since 2001, invaded nations and sent young men and women to more than a decade's worth of war, and killed and captured hundreds of extremists — including quite a number of them here in the homeland itself — who are hell-bent on doing us harm? Read more...

One of the odd elements of the Obama administration's management of the immigrant investor (EB-5) program is the way Republicans use it to make out like bandits.

The most recent example of this bit of bipartisanship-for-profit is taking place, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, in connection with fixing an old, old infrastructure problem — the lack of a direct connection between the granddaddy of super-highways, the east-west Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the north-south I-95. The two routes cross in Pennsylvania near Trenton, N.J., but it is difficult to get from one to the other.

The EB-5 program is about to be used to help finance a $420 million linkage between the two super-highways, with the apparent blessing of the Obama administration, but to the profit of well-connected Republican operatives in Pennsylvania. Read more...

President Obama’s decision to grant work permits and Social Security accounts to millions of illegal aliens guts the central enforcement provision of the 1986 amnesty bill and simultaneously illustrates why he cannot be trusted to carry out comprehensive reform of our immigration laws. Read more...

Adnan al Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born al Qaeda leader, was killed recently by Pakistan's military in a raid conducted in South Waziristan, one of the notoriously restive areas in the mountainous northwest of the country. Shukrijumah was known for his involvement in hatching plots against the West, including one to blow up the New York City subways. At the time of his death, there was a $5 million bounty on his head. Read more...

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.